I wanted to follow up on the last question that was asked at the speakers panel this evening. To my interpretation, the question was basically "I'm trying to sell some end users on the idea of using XML, should they care that it's XML?" That may not have been the actually question, but I think that's what I heard.
Unfortunately, that's a pretty interesting question, and the answer got totally lost in XML-RPC vs. SOAP / how badly does WSDL suck bickering and I don't think we really answered the guy's question.
My answer (speaking only for myself here) is that absolutely they SHOULDN'T care that it's XML. We as developers care because we have to write implemenations. End users shouldn't care in the slightest if it's XML. If I give my CFO a some data in CSV format, I'm pretty sure he doesn't care that the format is CSV, or that it has delimiters, or any other thing about it. What he cares about is that when he double clicks on the file, it comes up in Excel looking like a spreadsheet.
The problem is twofold: 1) we're not there yet with XML. You can't just double click on an XML file and have it come up in Excel looking like a spreadsheet (unless you're running Office 2003 Beta, which does actually manage to do just that through an amazingly clever combination of shell extensions and processing instructions, but that's an exception) 2) XML received so much hype 2-3 years ago that everyone thought (including end users) that they should care, since it's such a great buzzword.
Those are the things that we as developers have to fix, so that end users will be as blissfully ignorant of XML as the should be (are?) of CSV.